BITS; Privacy Questions Dog Facebook

By MIGUEL HELFT

Published: June 7, 2010

About 20 minutes into his on-stage interview at the D8 conference, Mark Zuckerberg had to take off his hoodie, the black sweatshirt that has become his trademark and that he said he never took off.

Mr. Zuckerberg was being grilled about Facebook's latest privacy flap, and he was visibly uncomfortable and sweating profusely. Mr. Zuckerberg was on the proverbial hot seat and he seemed to know it.

''There have been misperceptions that we are trying to make all information open,'' Mr. Zuckerberg said at one point. ''That's completely false.''

The short, crisp statement contrasted with most of his other answers, which were long and rambling, prompting even more questions from Walt Mossberg, the 63-year-old conference co-host.

Mr. Zuckerberg, 26, appeared ill-at-ease with questions that he had answered deftly a week earlier when he admitted that Facebook had made mistakes by letting its privacy settings grow too complicated. At the time, Mr. Zuckerberg announced simplified controls and appeared contrite.

This time, Mr. Zuckerberg was on the defensive for much of the time, but he appeared to get some sympathy from his audience.

When Mr. Mossberg said he would move on from the privacy grilling to other topics applause broke out in the room. But others were less forgiving.

The veteran technology journalist Dan Gillmor, for instance, wrote on Twitter: ''Walt Mossberg insists on an answer re FB's unilateral privacy changes; nope, still no answer.''

Things went considerably better for Mr. Zuckerberg after the questions moved on to other topics, like Facebook's future, his approach to management and competition.

Mr. Zuckerberg said that whenever Facebook made changes to the service, it was inevitable that some people would like them and others would not. Mr. Zuckerberg said he listened to user feedback and sometimes made changes accordingly.

Mr. Zuckerberg also said he had no interest in taking his company public. And he said he wanted to avoid the mistake of many other companies, which is focusing on their biggest competitors.

''It is more likely that the biggest competitor for us is someone we haven't heard of,'' he said.

Mr. Zuckerberg also said that Facebook remained a relatively small company with just one person working on its instant messaging software, 11 people working on its news feed, which is used by 250 million people daily, and just a dozen people working on its search feature, which gets used millions of times a day.

The topic of Facebook's growing pains, along with the growing pains of its young chief executive, came back with an audience question about whether Mr. Zuckerberg realized how important he -- and his decisions -- had become now that he ran a service used by nearly 500 million people. How does Mr. Zuckergberg deal with that, the questioner asked.